well i don't play skyrim but i do have a triple 1080p setup with a 4GB 970.

i can play GTA V across all three on ultra with about 200MB of graphics memory free, so you should, in theory, be able to do dual 4k monitors in Skyrim. might not be able to use ultra settings on everything though.

it's going to depend heavily on how Skyrim loads things into video memory. I believe Skyrim is less memory hungry in that department than GTA, so you may be fine keeping settings on ultra high with dual 4k. If not you could reduce textures or drop down to 1080p to play the game, and upgrade to dual SLI in a couple of months when the price of the 970 drops again.

World of Tanks is actually a better example, since it's rendering engine is much newer than Skyrim's, but it's a less-played game so I figured there'd be fewer people available to give first-hand advice.

So far I haven't bought any true "next gen" games for Windows; they've all been on the Xbox One. So I dunno what my video card does with, say, Evolve.

Skyrim is visually hard on graphics cards, but if it's computationally hard and relatively light on the memory consumption then you shouldn't have issues with that card on dual 4k screens.

I know that the total number of models that Skyrim loads is lower than GTA V which would usually make it less memory intensive, even as it is just as computationally intensive. The question, and one i don't have an answer to, is whether that's enough to make the difference.

Everyone was quite happy with the performance of the 970 before it was revealed that the last ½GB was slightly different. Upon hearing that, a lot of people got it in their heads that they needed a refund and a free upgrade to an 980, completely forgetting that they were quite content with the card before.

@blakeyrat, I don't personally have any higher end graphics cards, but everything I've seen suggests that you'd be hard pressed to get reasonable framerates on more recent demanding titles at 3840x2160 even with dual GTX 970s at higher settings. A single 970 isn't going to handle gaming at 2x4k very well. You might be able to compromise with lower settings, but that's beyond what I know.

Everyone was quite happy with the performance of the 970 before it was revealed that the last ½GB was slightly different. Upon hearing that, a lot of people got it in their heads that they needed a refund and a free upgrade to an 980, completely forgetting that they were quite content with the card before.

Everyone was quite happy with the performance of the 970 before it was revealed that the last ½GB was slightly different. Upon hearing that, a lot of people got it in their heads that they needed a refund and a free upgrade to an 980, completely forgetting that they were quite content with the card before.

The only reason I brought it up was because a couple of forum posts specifically called out that on multimonitor setups the "missing" half-gig of RAM might be problematic. (I put "missing" in quotes on purpose, because I know it's there, I just don't feel like going into it. It should be easy to find articles on it on Tom's Hardware etc.)

It doesn't sound like it, since there's actually missing ("The GM204-200 GPU has three SMM units disabled, for a total of 13/16 SMMs. This in turn disables some components of the memory sub-system. This leaves the chip with less resources to manage the same amount of memory as the GTX 980.") address hardware ("crossbar resources to the address system").

Looks like the only way to get dual 4k is to SLI or go with an ATI card.

I assume he's not going to want to replace his close-to-brand-new card. I did see one forum post claim a pair of Radeon 290s would be far more performant than one 970, but, is anyone surprised by that?

I assume he's not going to want to replace his close-to-brand-new card.

i would also assume so.

it's an option, but that would require you to use that abomination that is ATI and their "oh you upgraded your graphics drivers and now nothing works? oopsies! we'll like totally fix that for you in the next driver update. giggle it should only be about three months."

.... oh how i hate ATI for all they've put me through on support calls.

We can all do a bunch of ATI-bashing, but my PC, with a Geforce card has some serious coloring artifacts in HL2--the dark corridors in the beginning after you get the crowbar have a horrible rainbow on them that's simply not present on my son's PC with an ATI card.

At least Nvidia doesn't break and leave broken for months or years features of their cards just because the card id one model generation back from current and they couldn't be assed to test with the card before pushing the update.

Maybe they've changed in the seven years since i was last willing to deal with ATI, but i doubt it.

also i suspect you just have a graphics profile issue and there's a game specific one that you can have nvidia apply for you that fixes it. there's a lot of games that need those and nvidia usually just applies them automatically if you have the full driver set installed, which includes the geforce experience application.

if you don't have it already getting that app will probably fix the issue for you.

Fuck those guys for screwing over Shield Portable. You have a perfect portable gaming console with great specs and fairly low price and you proceed to not market it, not secure almost any games, and then withdraw it silently from the store to release a #2934988109248th tablet.

It was just Yet Another Android-Based Game Console. The market of which consists of maybe 47 users, all of whom already own Ouyas. It didn't help that it wasn't even an early YAABGC, it was announced in a huge crowd of similar devices, all competing for the same 47 users. At some point there were more YAABGCs than potential users of them.

Yeah there were a lot of games back then that would "install into Steam" from disk. Another one I remember is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

I got my copy of Half-Life 2 from a pack-in deal on an ATI video card. Then fucking Valve delayed their game by a full year and by the time it came out it barely ran on the card it came with. Fucking Valve.

The sole fact of this being a portable Android-based console (so you get, at the very least, multiple emulators right off the bat) without having to screw with a touchscreen sold it for me. That you could stream a game and play PC games allegedly comfortably was a pretty good idea too.

That game was one of the best when it comes to getting good combat physics. Every time I see what other games do, it really jars because I've seen how good it can be. (Knocking orcs off a cliff with the bits and pieces of their brethren from when you've got a good hit in does not really get old.)